Author Archives: Roksolana Ivashkevych

Week 14 Assignment: Guest Speaker – James Levine

Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.  (Neil Gaiman)

On one of the Internship classes, we had a guest speaker James Levine. I am always interested in meeting people who have achieved something in life as well as doing the job they love. I find such meetings very informative and useful as they give an insight at the way life can be and that we not always in charge of what happens to us but we are in charge of what we make happen.

During the lecture by James Levine, i learned that the dream of his life was to be a Photographer, which he became thanks to hard work and perseverance. He met with many other great people working for and owning major companies during photography career. I also learned that due to the unfortunate event of loosing clear vision he could not longer continue in the Photography field. So he then put all of his will and motivation into finding a new dream job of career coach. (Here is a link to his career coaching website http://jobsearchtherapy.com/ ). Exactly this fact had the biggest influence on me and that is why i used a quotes by Neil Gaiman to say that “…sometimes when you fall, you fly”, meaning that not all the downfalls break you,  sometimes when incident happens, you simply find a new way to be happy again. To me personally this means that no matter what happens to you in life, you are able to find new meaning and interpretation of the new given situation, the most important lesson is – never give up.

The rest of the lecture was information on how to do the job search in a proper and effective way, how to craft your resume and cover letter, how to approach the interviewer and many other useful tips. Also I wanted to mention that towards the end of the class, there was information given on the major advertising companies by James as well as information on many art and design organizations given by Professor Goetz.

During this class, I received a new insight at the creative field of design and advertising, as well as many practical advises about finding a dream job, and also on learning to reconsider your life and your goals and to never give up to matter what life brings you. Be courageous and always move forward!

(Photo source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lucky-me-james-levin )

Thank you

Week 11 Assignment: Hearst Visit

Hello,

I would like to share my personal impression from the visit of Hearst. Before the class trip, I researched Hearst company and was impressed with all the magazines that they publish. Also I found a lot of interesting information of their website. (http://www.hearst.com)

As I arrived to the destination, I was shocked by the huge building of the Hearst Publisher Company. Lower floor of the building stayed the same from the original building of previous century. 32 floors with new magazine on each floor- seemed to me like a great organization of the space. We went to 11th floor – the place of the production team. We were invited to the conference room where Adam and Phillis explained us the process of arranging the ready magazine pages into a final ready-to-print magazine version. For me, it was very exciting to learn about this process, and how it was done before computers with easy digital abilities. I enjoyed a lot the information I received during this presentation.

Later on, we went to the image editing room, which was dark with neutral grey walls and 5K professional lamps for the daylight effect to proof the colors of printed pages. The presenter in this room showed us how raw images are edited, and so how the editorial work is done in the company. The next was room of final soft and hard magazine proof. I think this room is the most important, since from here the magazine is going to the printer and so the very final version is determined. Michael Patrissi seemed very knowledgeable about the printing proof process and I learned new information.

Also, I have to mention our guide, Chuck, who was very friendly and welcoming and answered all the questions that we had for him. I am very grateful to visit such a big company and take a glance inside the process of creation of many popular glossy magazines, like Cosmopolitan and Harper’s Bazaar. I learned a lot of new things which I did not know before. It was a great tour and I am very happy I joined it!

Thank you

Internship: week 8

Hello stranger! I am very happy to see you at my site 😀

This week at my internship I kept working on the website development. It reached 120 required hours for my class yet I will keep working at this place as I enjoy working here and my boss was happy having me there so far. Since there is mostly coding that I do now, I will be working  remotely from home. I learned many new things as well as gained valuable experience in my field of interest. This is very important for me, since at my previous work places I often felt like I was wasting my time (doing technical support and customer service). It is now when looking back, I do realize that every kind of experience is definitely a plus and everything we do teaches us something weather we want it or not.

I want to conclude  with the quote by Eleanor Roosevelt: “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” Keep dreaming and believe in your dreams! They do come true, you just need to pay close attention. 🙂

©Roksolana Ivashkevych Photography

Thank you.

Internship: weeks 6,7

Hello and thank you for visiting my blog!

©Roksolana Ivashkevych Photography

In this post I decided to add this image as for me it symbolizes hard work and perseverance. Why would I talk about it? Because these two weeks were rather complicated and required a lot of hard work and energy from me. At my internship, we moved to coding of the site,  building the theme from scratch and editing it using PHP. I needed to do a lot of reading of WordPress Codex, searching Youtube for related videos and the information there is not always clear and so it is very time consuming. Do not get me wrong, I like to learn new things, just sometimes they are hard to comprehend.

I really like one quote by Eleanor Roosevelt, “You must do the things you think you cannot do.” It always keeps me motivated and pushes me to try new things which otherwise I would be scared to even start. I believe that the only thing that might keep us from doing something we want to try is the fear in our own head which is subjective in majority of cases. This fear would make us procrastinate or even keeping from starting as it blocks our self belief. This was the case with my internship work. I was scared to do some complex things which I did not know in the beginning, Yet the consistency and willingness to proof my fears wrong helped me on the way.

Never give up and be your own hero! Stay tuned…

Week 7 Assignment – Digital Storefront

Digital Storefront (electronic storefront, cyber storefront, e-storefront, online storefront, virtual storefront) is an e-commerce solution for merchants who want to host a website that offers goods and/or services for sale, advertises their products or services and for which consumer transactions are generated online; and which the customers or ‘window shoppers’ can visit at any time and from anywhere. It includes: Product display, online ordering software, inventory management applications, billing and online payment system, and payment processing software, Web analytics, secure socket layer (SSL) security, Web2Print, etc.

Web2print storefront: is a digital solution provided by web2print companies for people who want to perform printing business for companies and businesses. It allows to create and sell stationary, promotional printing (marketing elements), print on clothing, print on mugs etc. Here is a video I found which helps to understand what is web2print storefront https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJW1X_Uk7u0

  1. Overview of the application.

One example of the storefront Application offering Web2Print solution is Webtools4print. They offer services like website building, Ecommerce implementation, Designing tool as well as customized personalized “storefront” for each unique visitor. 2. Competitors in this space:

In USA similar companies are: Red-Tie, PrintSites, efi, Design’N’Buy, MyPrintCloud, Web2print Experts, Rocket Print Software, OnPrintShop, Propago, Gelato, PageFlex, Pixopa, Print Science, Pixl Park, Avanti Systems, B2CPrint, PrintingForLess.

3. How would it be used and applied to a designers job function.

In my opinion, there is a lot of opportunity for the designer’s skills implementation in Storefront tool. This includes coding websites, designing appearance of the e-Commerce (online store), designing templates for Web2Print solutions.

Thank you

Internship: week 5

Hello again and thank you for visiting my mini-blog.

Recently I have been thinking a lot about eternity and transience of life. As we go through life, we enter different stages gaining experiences; and each moment leaves a trace of memory and each person or thing that we encounter adds to our greater world perception as well as the idea of what it means to be alive. I wanted to say that I am very grateful for a chance to have internship in an environment that is very peaceful to my soul and gives me positive emotions and thoughts. It is art that makes our life colorful. As Picasso once said, ‘Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.‘ To me, art is a rainbow on the sky after a rainy day.

©Roksolana Ivashkevych Photography

On the week 5 I finally moved to the stage of creating wiferames and mockups for the website. We implemented few ideas of how to make the site simple and easy to navigate. Since there will be a lot of photos on the site, it is of a great importance to figure out how to minimize the loading time of each page and make user experience pleasant and engaging.

Stay tuned…

Internship: week 4

Hello reader and welcome to my mini blog 🙂
My 4th week of the internship was a lot of fun. I had a chance to see the art creation process in the studio. Model came in and was posing for the portrait. She is a muse to the artist – my boss. The profess of painting creation starts with many drawing sketches under different lighting set up, the next step is either painting or sculpture of the model.
As for my work, I continued working on he content creation as well as started to map out the sitemap – the website structure. As I am not allowed to share the information about the site in progress, I am posting a picture of the art creation which I secretly took.

Thank you and stay tuned…